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ViewsMonday, November 10, 2014The Peasants Still Have Their PitchforksWhat can we expect Congress to do about America’s staggeringly top-heavy concentration of income and wealth over the next two years? Absolutely nothing. What do Americans want Congress to do about that concentration? A good bit. We know the first answer from the simple math of last week’s election...Read more

ViewsTuesday, September 30, 2014Why an Unequal Planet Can Never Be GreenWhat is it going to take to save the planet from environmental devastation? Sheer people power? We certainly saw that on the eve of last week’s UN Climate Summit in New York. Some 400,000 marchers packed the streets of Manhattan. Millions more rallied the same day in over 2,600 other actions in 162...Read more

ViewsSaturday, August 30, 2014Inequality and the USA: A Nation in Denial?Every August, for most of the last four decades, top central bankers from around the world have been making their way to the Wyoming mountain resort of Jackson Hole for an invitation-only blue-ribbon economic symposium. This year’s Jackson Hole hobnob, once again hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank...Read more

ViewsTuesday, August 05, 2014Inside Our Profoundly Unequal ‘New Normal’The Commerce Department released some revised figures on America’s economy last week. Previous numbers, Commerce researchers noted, had overestimated the share of the nation’s income going to workers and underestimated the share going to America’s asset-rich. “Everything’s coming up roses for...Read more

ViewsMonday, June 30, 2014America’s CEOs: In a Class All by ThemselvesThe free market made us do it. Ask members of any American corporate board of directors why they pay their CEO so much and you’ll get some variation on this market-inevitability theme. To compete effectively in the world economy, Corporate America’s argument goes, we need world-class executive...Read more

ViewsMonday, June 16, 2014A New Spin from the Inequality Denialist SetThe go-to intellectual guardians of our corporate order — those conservative analysts whose op-eds appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal — have a problem. Their defense of plutocracy just isn’t selling. Two events this spring have now put this failure in particularly stark relief. First came...Read more

ViewsMonday, June 09, 2014The Many Pipelines that Pump Our Wealth UpBack in 1979, notes a new Economic Policy Institute report released last week, households in America’s statistical middle — the 20 percent of households making more than the nation’s poorest 40 percent and less than the nation’s most affluent 40 percent — averaged $16.72, after inflation, per hour...Read more

ViewsMonday, April 28, 2014The Big Tip That America’s Servers Never SeeA good many Americans now know the high-finance games that JPMorgan Chase and other big banks like to play — at our expense. And big oil giants like ExxonMobil have been outraging Americans for years. But plenty of other corporate giants that inflate our inequality have been flying under the radar...Read more